Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath

by Malcolm Smith

  The servant was free, leaping and dancing down the road, but freedom for the servant had been a costly action for the king. Astronomical debts, or little ones for that matter, do not disappear into thin air! For the servant to be forgiven, the king had experienced an inner death; he had died to the right to expect any repayment of what was owed to him. In sending the debt away from the servant, he had to receive it in full. Moved with compassion, the king came from his accounting ledger to join the servant in his debt, assume it, and pay it off by canceling it.

  The old covenant of the law was necessary, for it was a time when men and women must face the debt to God that each one owes. But the heart of God is love, not the accounting office. He comes where we are and joins Himself to us; He assumes our debt and absorbs it Himself. He declares a divine amnesty that He has made possible in the blood of Jesus.

  Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ...God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them...

  For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

  2 Corinthians 5:18,19,21

  We were the enemies of God, and He came to us where we were and achieved our reconciliation so that He is “not imputing their trespasses to them.” The New American Standard Bible gives a clearer translation: not counting their trespasses (verse 19). He is not the accountant adding figures and counting debts; He is the king moved with compassion and declaring us free from all debts.

  Hear the Gospel, and know why it is called the Good News. Our slate has been wiped clean of all sin, the guilt and shame gone. But our sins did not dissolve into thin air! He achieved this for us in Christ, who came where we were in our sin and became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. The law condemns us, but He has taken our sin and there is nothing left to condemn.

  There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

  Romans 8:1

  On one occasion Jesus said, "Assuredly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they may utter" (Mark 3:28). Such a statement leaves us speechless with joy and wonder: “All sins, whatever they are, will be sent away, be dismissed, leave you in a state of freedom and liberty” is our expanded translation.

  The second parable that portrays His forgiveness is of the lost son. Jesus tells the story of two sons. The younger of them insolently demanded of his father that he divide the inheritance between the children even though the father was still alive. The law of that day said that the inheritance should be the parent’s to use until death, but the son was saying in effect, “I cannot wait for you to drop dead; give me the money now!”

  The father sold off one-third of the farm to give the younger one his one-third share of the inheritance, leaving the remaining two-thirds for the firstborn. It is obvious from the end of the story that the father forgave the young man for his rejection and actions even as the son was insulting his father and demanding the money. But the boy knew neither his father’s love nor that he was forgiven; in fact, it does not appear that he even thought about the need to be forgiven. He squandered the money and in days of famine became a pig herder, which for a Jew was to become an abomination. Hunger finally made him think of home and returning to his father for a good meal. He had no sense of needing the father’s love; he only wanted an act of charity that would make him a hired servant.

  Day after day and month after month, the father scanned the horizon at the place where he had last seen the son. Now he saw the familiar figure, though only a silhouette against the sky. He ran to where the young man was and burst unannounced upon him, embracing him, kissing him repeatedly, and refusing to hear any talk of the son’s becoming a hired man. He had servants bring his own best robe and shoes, while he put his own signet ring on the man’s hand. The calf fattened for such an occasion was killed and roasted; the band was called in for dancing and universal celebration.

  The words “forgiveness” and “reconciliation” are not mentioned in the story, yet it is obvious that the father accomplished in history what he had actually accomplished in his heart when the young man had left. At that time, he had released the young man of any moral, filial, or familial debt, and now his repeated kissing and crushing embrace announced that fact to the son. He was free from his debt of sin to his father; he was returned to the family table and proclaimed by his father as his son.

  The father expressed it by saying, “He was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” He was referring to the dismal journey the son had taken when he had been lost from his father’s love and without a map in life. In such a condition, he was dead; that is unaware, deaf, and unresponsive to his fathers’ love.

  As in the previous story, one received a free, unconditional forgiveness; but another inwardly died to give it. When the son asked for the money and headed for the far country, the father died to any expectancy of repayment on his rejected love. When the son returned, the father died to receiving back the years of lost love; he died by accepting the shame the young man had brought to his name. His love for the young man caused him to die to the respect of the village. It was counted as a shame for an old man to gird up his loins and run, as he had done when he’d seen his son. He would also have lost their respect and gone through an inner death when he had not handed his son over for the punishment the law demanded for sons who dishonored their father and mother.

  His inner death was swallowed up by his love for the returning son as he flung his arms around the young man, embraced him, and gave him one of his own festive robes, his own shoes, and his own ring. His love continued to swallow death and become resurrection at a public feast of ecstatic joy, where he made it known that the past was not to be discussed; that this was his son once lost to him but now found, once dead to his love but now alive.

  In the same way, the Triune God forgave us totally, wiped the slate clean, and robed us with His own righteousness. But to do so, He died in the heart of His Triune Being. He died before the rebellion and consequent sin of the man and the woman and a sinful race had come into being. Jesus, the Son of God, is described as being slain before the foundation of the world, before it became manifested in history at Golgotha.

  In these stories, Jesus showed the overwhelming desire of God to forgive. He described Him as excited, hurrying to bestow forgiveness as one who delights in giving and cannot wait to see the joy on the recipient’s face when he or she receives.

  The elder brother in the parable of Luke 15 wanted to remember sin and condemn and punish the younger brother. The father was not interested in knowing any of the sins the returning son had been involved in; he was consumed with the desire to celebrate the return of his son with an extravagant party. When we feel condemned over our past sin, we must at that point deliberately join the party and dance to the tune of His grace and love.

  Our repentance does not move an angry and insulted God to grant us forgiveness. Rather, we are greeted by intense and passionate love that ambushes us, to which we respond in repentance. We can give our lives away to such love.

  Jesus emerged from death our new covenant Head, having secured our pardon, and the words of Isaiah were fulfilled.

  I have blotted out, like a thick cloud, your transgressions, and like a cloud, your sins. Return to Me, for I have redeemed you.”

  Sing, O heavens, for the LORD has done it! Shout, you lower parts of the earth; break forth into singing, you mountains, O forest, and every tree in it! For the LORD has redeemed Jacob, and glorified Himself in Israel.

  Isaiah 44:22,23

  Chapter 13: I in You, You in Me

  In understanding the covenant, there are two phrases that are of supreme importance. The first is the expression “in Christ”; it is a phrase that indicates that we are vitally in and part of the historical events that took pl
ace, and it is a phrase that indicates that by the Holy Spirit, we have actually been joined and made one with Jesus Christ so that His history has become our history. We are vitally one with Him in all that He has accomplished and all that He is now in the heavens.

  The second phrase that we find throughout the New Testament is “in the Spirit”; it indicates the dynamic experience of the power of the Spirit actually joining us to Christ and His work and making it real in our lives. What originated in eternity in the loving heart of God the Father was effected in history by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the Son and is received and experienced by the people of God through the work of the Holy Spirit.

  The problem in the church today is that we tend to focus on one of the phrases to the exclusion of the other. On the one hand, the work of Christ is studied objectively, out there in history, with little or no sense of the Spirit’s making that work effective in our lives today. On the other hand, many are fascinated by the Spirit’s power with little or no interest in understanding what happened in the historical work of Christ in His making the new covenant. The two phrases belong together; the Spirit is the presence of our covenant God in power making real and vital in us all that has been accomplished by Christ.

  I cannot emphasize strongly enough the place of the Spirit in the covenant. Apart from the Holy Spirit, there is no new covenant. The lifestyle of the men and women in the new covenant is that of loving even as they are loved by God; that is an impossible goal apart from the work of the Spirit. The supernatural gifts of the Spirit are part of the dynamic of the covenant people and are totally the work of the Spirit.

  The old covenant that Israel lived under was one of shadows, promises, and hope. The new covenant, called a “better covenant,” is founded on the work of the Lord Jesus and is primarily the covenant of fulfillment, of power, in which God and His people are dynamically joined as one in the work of the Spirit.

  The covenant seeks for union of two parties, something that the old covenant, although revealing the presence of God dwelling in the people’s midst in a very real way, could ultimately only point to, anticipate, and wait for. Ezekiel saw clearly that the Holy Spirit living within the believer would accomplish this union. He looked for the day when God would dwell not merely with but within His people.

  Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.

  Ezekiel 36:25-27

  Both Ezekiel and Jeremiah saw it as the day when the law would be not an exterior command but an interior bent of life.

  But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.

  Jeremiah 31:33

  “The heart” in Scripture is understood to be the source and life spring of behavior:

  Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.

  Proberbs 4:23

  The law would no longer be a list of exterior commands but would arise from within; it is no longer “This is what you must do” but is “This is what I want to do.” Behind all of God’s commands is one command—to love as He loves—and the new covenant joins us to the love of God by the Spirit, who is the driving life force and ability to live such a life.

  The new covenant goes far beyond the demands of the old, which was summed up as “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Under the new covenant, the Spirit coming within the believer pours out the divine love at the center of being. Romans 5:5 tells us, ...the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

  This means that the command of Jesus becomes possible:

  “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”

  John 13:34,35

  All the prophets saw that the new covenant would be a covenant of the Spirit, when He would indwell God’s people; and from that presence, the heart of the law would be a natural direction the heart would go. When speaking of coming to Christ, the evangelist will call people to “receive Jesus” or “let Jesus come into your heart.” Although that is true, the New Testament never speaks of salvation in that way. Always the New Testament speaks of being a Christian as one’s receiving the Spirit and the Spirit’s dwelling within the person. It is through the Spirit that Jesus dwells in us.

  Paul is adamant that if the Spirit does not dwell within us, then we are not Christians at all! By describing our conversion as receiving Jesus, we then believe that the Spirit reception comes later and is for an above average Christian, a spiritual elite. But the Scripture is plain; no one can belong to Christ without having the Holy Spirit. Nor can we know that God is our dear Father and we His sons and daughters apart from the work of the Spirit.

  But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.

  Romans 8:9

  And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!”

  Galatians 4:6

  The Bear Hug of God

  The very first blessing the Father would bestow upon the believer is the gift of knowing the Spirit, through whom he or she has come to know the covenant. Leaders of the earliest church of the first centuries laid hands on the new believer still soaking wet from the water of baptism and prayed they would receive the Holy Spirit. The Spirit had wooed them and brought them to Christ to confess Him as Lord and had brought about the miracle of their being joined to Christ. Now they prayed that the Spirit they lived in would be fully known to them.

  For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit.

  1 Corinthians 12:13

  The Spirit is the One who puts us into the body of Christ, and we then drink deeply of Him. One description of the Spirit’s relationship to a believer is in the phrase “to fall upon.”

  While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who heard the word.

  Acts 10:44

  The expression “fell upon” is an old English expression that means “to give a bear hug, embrace fervently.”1 It is used in Luke 15:

  And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.

  Luke 15:20

  It describes the outpouring of the passionate, unconditional love of the father toward his returning son. It is significant that Luke wrote the Acts as well as his gospel, and so there is no doubt as to what he meant by this phrase. The first experience of the believer is meant to be a bear hug given by God the Holy Spirit welcoming the new believer into the family of God.

  When we are given a bear hug, or a fervent embrace, all the ideas associated with love move from an intellectual concept to the actual experience of being loved. When we say that God loves us, we must never think of that in terms of a cold statement of doctrine; we must understand that the Holy Spirit is God in the act of loving us, embracing and enfolding His arms about us. The Holy Spirit is God running to us, flinging His arms around us, and passionately loving us. It is the quantum leap between knowing about a position in Christ, our representative, and actually experiencing the covenant in the bear hug of God the Spirit.

  In the 1970s I was invited to address the students at a large and prestigious theological seminary concerning the Charismatic renewal and the experience of the Holy
Spirit. I spoke to the entire seminary and then a smaller class. They gave me respectful attention, and after I had finished my lecture to the smaller class I opened the floor for questions. They plied me with questions for some forty-five minutes, and I realized it was degenerating into a tedious theological debate. I held up my hand and said, “I believe I have shown you from Scripture and church history that the new covenant is the covenant of the Spirit, and we can experience Him in our lives today as they did in the New Testament and early church. Now it is time to move from discussion to letting Him come into our lives as we have not done before, and I would ask for the privilege of laying hands on you and praying for you.” The classroom was empty in two minutes!